An Afterword to My Visit

This celebratory afterword offers reflections of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s influence in the decades following the first collection of his verse, not only in its discovery in literature from regions not immediately associated with Hopkins, but also in its applicability and revelations through newer disciplines of literary analysis.

Introduction: “Rash-Fresh, Re-Winded, New-Skeinèd Score”

Hopkins is the “consummate incendiary,” the fire-starter of much twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and a much more significant influence than has previously been acknowledged. Hopkins's still-burning fires ignited the imaginations of early Modernist writers, later twentieth-century poets, contemporary American writing, and modern Caribbean poetry. Hopkins’s "enduring newness" (his linguistic innovations, his metaphysical insights) continually breaks forth in new contexts and with new and surprising meanings.

“A Mix of Mineral and Grease”

Gerard Manley Hopkins has had a pervasive influence on contemporary Appalachian poets, rooted in such early twentieth century authors as Elizabeth Madox Roberts and continued into the new century by poets and novelists such as Robert Morgan, Jane Hicks, Ron Rash, Maurice Manning, Melissa Range, and Rose McLarney. Hopkins’s work has challenged these writers “to see the interconnectedness of their subjects, inviting them to explore and manipulate language in inventive, surprising fashion, and eliciting from them forthright self-examination of their sense of self, place, and spirit.”

“Before the Word and World became Separate”

There is in Charles Wright’s work a complicated spiritual quest that frequently turns to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Wright’s reappearing “pilgrim” persona, who, unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims, never arrives at his intended destination, persists in a stubborn search for divine insight. Wright uses Hopkins as a sounding board, both in the sense of testing his own spiritu- ality against Hopkins’s and the sense of experimenting with Hopkins’s very sounds. Wright marvels at his predecessor’s ability to combine world, word, and Word; he often attempts, and fails, to do the same, coming to believe that language has become severed from its spiritual origins, but in exploring that rift, which Wright often does in Hopkinsian terms, the poet “burrows deep into the core of the human condition” and achieves a gravity unlike that of any other contemporary poet.

“Such a Mix of Beauty and Horror”

T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf demonstrate contrasting modes of Modernist response to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. While Eliot grudgingly acknowledged Hopkins’s innovations even as he dismissed him as a writer of narrow range and limited importance, Woolf’s response was robust and lasting. Close readings and textual analyses of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts, as well as Woolf ’s diaries and letters, reveal that from 1919 onwards, Hopkins is never far from Woolf ’s modes of discourse, becoming an important resource as she developed her theory of “prose poetry” and worked to develop her own singular rhythms.

“Admire and Do Otherwise”

Gerard Manley Hopkins had a powerful impact on Ivor Gurney, who had poems by Hopkins with him in the WWI trenches. Gurney epitomizes the dramatic change from nineteenth-century poetry to Modernism, and this change was fundamentally influenced by the example of Hopkins. While Gurney did not mimic Hopkins’s mannerisms or take on his themes, from Hopkins he learned to harness and hold expansive energy within his own eccentric forms. In so doing, Gurney set a pattern for later writers responding to Hopkins.

“Hack and Rack the Growing Green”

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s environmental concerns are not only ecological but also “ecotheological” in that he addresses both the relation of organisms to one another and their connection to divinity. Ecotheology (creation-centered approaches to theology) differs from ecocriticism (literary criticism centered on environmental awareness), and there is a tradition of ecotheological thought within Catholicism, ranging from St. Francis of Assisi to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Pope Francis. In poems like “Binsey Poplars,” “As kingfishers catch fire,” and “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins’s Christian symbolism and ecotheological themes demonstrate that, for him, nature’s importance stems from its sacredness. These Hopkinsian strands are picked up by three contemporary poets—Denise Levertov, Pattiann Rogers, and Martha Silano—who, though not as orthodox as Hopkins in their religious views, nevertheless share his ecotheological impulses. These writers represent, together with their Jesuit predecessor, “a particular poetic community” that, like the God of Genesis, sees an inherent goodness and value in creation. These contemporary poets are examples of the many writers who have echoed Hopkins’s ecotheological concerns.

The One Sane Milkman, I Fear

In his lifelong wrestle with what he called his “frenemy” God, John Berryman continually turned to the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sacramental vision. Amidst his struggles with depression, alcoholism, and self-doubt, Berryman looked to Hopkins as a model for how to express, and how to embrace, difficult belief. A close reading of Berryman’s “Dream Song 377,” a poem that takes Hopkins as a subject and evokes one of his sermons, shows not only that Berryman adopted versions of Hopkins’s stanzaic and stress patterns, but also that he, along with Henry, his poetic alter ego in the Dream Songs, shared with Hopkins a hunger for a still center.

Hansen’s Hopkins

Ron Hansen’s Exiles (2009), a fictionalization of the writing of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” presents a transformation of Gerard Manley Hopkins into “a postmodern fictional proposition.” Hansen’s Hopkins embodies an investigation of otherness that illustrates Derrida’s concept of hospitality while transforming Hopkins “into text.” Hansen’s emulates Hopkins’s innovation through his genre-bending pursuit in creating this fictional version of Hopkins, combining poetry, historical fiction, and literary analysis into a composite text, even at times emulating and incorporating Hopkins’s own poetic language in this new creation.

“A Billion Times Told Lovelier”

While Gerard Manley Hopkins’s formal innovations have been widely celebrated, his originality as a theological thinker has been overlooked. Hopkins’s well-known debts to Duns Scotus and Ignatius of Loyola have unjustly eclipsed other strands of his theological thought, leading to a reductive view of his religious thinking. There is a tendency among some scholars to sever Hopkins’s poetic innovations from his religious legacy and, at times, view his faith as an affliction that shackled his creativity. However, the tensions between Hopkins’s priestly and poetic vocations were not, in fact, disabling, and Geoffrey Hill’s reading of Hopkins reveals the latter to be a unique theological thinker, not just a poetic innovator. Hill demonstrates an unparalleled grasp of Hopkins’s theological ingenuity and collapses the division between Hopkins’s theological and poetic legacies, proving that each is reciprocally sustained in the other. Hill’s own use of language, in turn, is deeply informed by Hopkins’s poetic legacy. Hill believed that to combat linguistic degeneration, speech must remain vital, and, for him, this meant writing against the grain of history and linguistic decay in order to disturb expectation. This belief is shaped by Hopkins’s own theology of language, registered at the level of his poetics, the weighty and dense rhythms of which can be viewed as a mimetic for his ethical, moral, and theological perceptions.